1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of communicating changes in the states and contractual responsibilities of parties, and in particular to an apparatus and method for communicating these changes using an agreed message exchange protocol.
2. Description of Related Art
Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the number of parties engaging in e-commerce. On-line catalogues, shop fronts, auctions and electronic market places aggregate potentially large numbers of buyers and sellers allowing them to engage in a whole host of virtual transactions. Increasingly traders (agent programs acting on behalf of enterprise roles) are used by parties in the e-market place to negotiation goods of services. When agreement is reached, the traders return with a contract that specifies the details of the trade, and which they have to execute to perform their contractual commitments related to this trade.
It is often difficult to reliably monitor contract performance and receive timely information as to whether a party is actually going to carry out their contractual obligations. In today's age, people communicate using the telephone or fax or via e-mail, and as events unfold that impact commitment levels for an agreed contract, ad-hoc telephone conversations, e-mails and faxes are used to assess new commitment levels. The main drawbacks of these communication methods are that they are often unstructured and untimely, no records communication can be readily kept, and there are high costs associated with the management of data related to this process.
R. G. Smith “The Contract Net Protocol: High Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver”, IEEE Transactions on Computers 1980, C-29, 12 pp. 1104–1113 focuses on the aspect of bidding for task execution. When a decision is made to accept a task no further state except “completed” is allowed. The problem with this is that once a part commits to undertake a task it cannot refuse to carry out a task.
T. W. Sandholm, V. R. Lesser, “Advantages of a Levelled Commitment Contracting Protocol”, Proceedings of AAAI-96, pp. 126–133 Builds the Smith document and allows a party to refuse to execute a task after it has been agreed. This document discloses using a single parameter analysis (price) of utility of not performing a task taking into account the penalty. The document focuses on decision theory for committing or decommitting from a task. The disclosure does not consider the notion of a beneficiary of obligation that may waive this obligation, nor does it specify a way to handle delegated obligations. In addition, the document does not specify the contract model that contains obligations that need to be communicated, and neither does it specify the message format (content) to be exchanged by the contract parties.
Hewlett Packard “ChangeEngine Application Programming Interface Reference Guide”, HP Part No 2279-90024 ChangeEngine Access Protocol carried over HTTP allows clients to connect and send requests to the Work List server. The protocol allows authorised clients to access a work list, set and read data, and start a process associated with the task. A notification message can be returned to the authorised client if required when a process changes date. The protocol does not allow a work item to be refused and so de-committing from a task is not a normal operation. When a client requests the start of a process and it cannot be started an exception is generated. The disclosed model focuses on processes and work items (activity centric) rather than contractual obligations (state centric).
J. R. Putman “Architecting with RM-ODP”, Prentice Hall 2000 introduces a policy model for specifying a policy being part of an environment contract. The document specifies policy (commitment) types Obligation, Prohibition, Permission and Authorisation to control actions. The disclosure does not consider a notion of a state associated with the Policy that changes as future events occur, nor does it introduce a protocol to communicate changes of policy states as viewed by each enterprise.
None of the above-mentioned disclosures addresses the need for a system that allows parties to estimate the likelihood of a commitment being actually realised by a party and to utilise this information promptly for planning, scheduling, forecasting and other processes of value in the enterprise.
The present invention seeks to address or significantly mitigate one or more of the aforementioned problems.